How The Outlast Trials Is Different From Outlast 1 & 2
In December of 2019, Red Barrels, the studio behind one of horror genres' classics, Outlast and Outlast 2, revealed that a new game was coming to the occult horror series, called The Outlast Trials. The new game announcement came from a social media post on Red Barrels' official Facebook page, but even some hardcore Outlast fans noticed not much about the game was talked about after that, which seemed odd considering the first two games gathered a lot of attention from horror fans and gamers alike. Even after an official trailer for The Outlast Trials was released on June 13th, it didn't seem like the game was getting the hype that the other two received.
When Outlast came out on Sept. 4th, 2013, the camcorder-focused survival horror title took the gaming community by storm. The game followed Miles Upshur, a freelance reporter wanting to investigate a suspicious and creepy-looking asylum. Armed with his night vision-equipped video camera, he ventures into the asylum to document the goings-on and reveal what really happened there. Unfortunately he finds himself to be part of the action himself, and has limited sources available to help him survive. The game earned a decent score of 7.8 on Metacritic, and with support from indie fans, helped get a second game going, named Outlast II.
When Outlast II was released in 2017, it seemed like there wasn't a single gaming YouTube channel that wasn't playing it. The second one followed a similar premise to the first game, with an outsider, armed with only a camcorder, wanders into a cult-like village way out in a corn field and finds himself trapped against the horrors he finds there. The game carried over many of the features from the first, and again, earned a very good score from critics and players.
However, many fans of horror games, and the Outlast series in general, didn't even know a third installment of the series, called The Outlast Trials, had been announced back in December of 2019. The studio behind Outlast even teased a creepy image on their social media, and people quickly speculated that it was for a new Outlast game. A month after that came the announcement, and nothing was heard about the game until months later, when a (less than two minutes-long) trailer was released for The Outlast Trails.
The Outlast Trials is described as a co-op horror game where players need to utilize the help of friends in order to survive a similar situation that mirrors the other two games, except for it being multiplayer instead of a single-player survival horror experience. The trailer places viewers in an asylum-like operating room surrounded by three surgeons operating on a very conscious person. The next couple of scenes follow a character who is being chased by an extremely tall, lengthy creature and is met by a friend at the end of the hallway. She reaches out her hand to help the character make it over the wall, but is knifed in the back of her neck, and the character is seen falling back to the ground, where the shadowed creature has caught up to him.
The end of the trailer announces that the "Freedom Ends" in 2021. As of writing this, the trailer has almost 200 thousand views, which is very decent for an indie game, but not as good as fans of the series would expect from Outlast. Perhaps the focus on multiplayer is something which fans of the franchise would rather do without, or perhaps the 2021 release date is too far away for hype to begin building. Horror is usually best experienced alone, and depending on how it's implemented multiplayer could make for a less immersive, and thus less scary, experience.
Whether or not the third game will get enough attention from fans and critics, The Outlast Trials could still do really well with sales as long as there is interest in the horror community. Indie horror games tend to do a bit better than regular indie games, as seen with massive successes such as Five Night's at Freddy's, and the Outlast series has been no exception.